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Monthly Archives: August 2014

In case you need to debug the kernel on a VM running on Hyper-V, this is how you can do it with a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM Generation 2:

After the VM has been created, a COM port is needed. By default, you cannot create a COM port with the Hyper-V Manager UI. That’s one of the differences between Gen1 and Gen2. You have to use Powershell to get your COM port. First of all shut down the VM and disable SecureBoot (replace YourVMName with the name of your VM and make sure you run all commands with “run as administrator”):Set-VMFirmware -VMName YourVMName -EnableSecureBoot Off

Then create the COM port as follow:Set-VMComPort -VMName YourVMName 1 \\.\pipe\DebugITThe “1” is the COM port you want to use (feel free to adjust it if needed) and the pipe path. The last string of the pipe can as well be adjusted, you could use something else than DebuIT.

Configure the COM connection according to the screen shot:
Port: \\.\pipe\DebugIT

You will see “Waiting to reconnect…” afterwards. That’s ok because we haven’t started yet debugging. Choose Debug –> Break (or Ctrl+Break). That’s it, you’re now able to debug the kernel of the running VM:

Windows Error Reporting is a nice tool from Microsoft. It collects required Information from an exception that happend and (if you want so) checks online if there is a solution for your issue. By default it creates a memory minidump of that process that crashed. Often a minidump is good enough to narrow down the issue, but what if it’s not enough? There’s the possibility to enable full Memory dumps when an application crashes. You can enable it with the following key:

Note that the above is a global setting (per computer). It’s also possible to set it just for 1 application. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb787181(v=vs.85).aspx for more Information.